It started out as just another curiosity. What would become of us if all our experiences and memories could be stored forever and retrieved at will? Now, the audiovisual capture of daily experiences is a reality that receives the name of lifelogging (life log) and consists of collecting data, daily, on personal experiences through portable sensors. In other words, it is documenting our lives with devices capable of measuring and recording everything, such as geographic location, heart rate, diets, hours of sleep and leisure time.
But in a world where the lifelogging begins to become popular, more and more users, sociologists and digital analysts question this practice. Is this tendency a product of human curiosity with great potential for self-knowledge or is it rather an egocentric tendency that allows permanent exposure to the Internet and loss of privacy?
A digital autobiography
To understand what is lifelogging 49 minutes are needed. The trend was depicted in the episode The Entire History of You (All Your History) from the Netflix series Black Mirror and it was a complete success. The chapter narrates a world in which the majority of the population has adopted a digital device behind their ears that allows them to record everything they see and hear, storing all their memories in one place. Using a remote control, people can rewind any memory they want to access to relive it and can even project it on a screen to share with others. “Before I thought that I would like to have an integrated camera, in such a way that when I blink two or three times in a row, it would start recording. I have never considered it possible to do so because, for me, the most complicated thing was where I would store all that information”, acknowledges the sociologist and digital analyst Marta Espuny Contreras. “But now that I think about it, would I really be willing to give the recordings of my experiences to a company? No. That’s why I was never sold on the idea,” she adds.
Today, ten years after the premiere of the episode of Black Mirror, this Netflix story is getting closer to becoming a reality. Although the most advanced concept of lifelogging —which aspires to record experiences in their entirety, as in the episode of Black Mirror— not yet possible for technical and legal reasons, it is already partially available. Jorge Franganillo, a researcher at the University of Barcelona, is the author of the study ‘Lifelogging’: the phenomenon of personal black boxes. “Although the possibility of recording all the events of daily life is a pipe dream, it is possible to create a certain record of daily life. It is precisely what many people are already doing, almost without realizing it”, explains the researcher. In his work, Franganillo highlights that the lifelogging It is already more present in health self-monitoring applications (physical activity, diet, vital signs), tracking and location applications (mobile trackers, geolocation applications), tools for the externalization of human memory (from a USB memory to the “ cloud”), and surveillance and counter-surveillance. In addition, specific devices are already being sold on the market to carry the lifelogging at another level, such as SnapCam and YoCam, devices capable of recording everything the user sees for hours at a time and sharing the material instantly, and applications that record everything, such as EXIST.
However, the quintessential device for making lifelogging It is in everyone’s palm and it is the mobile. “Users, with their instant messaging and email applications, their social media posts and digital photo albums, are already creating a chronological and geographical reference, as many people keep a continuous and detailed record in real time of various aspects relevant to their own lives”, explains Franganillo.
The best example is social networks and their applications that constitute what Franganillo calls “a digital autobiography” of the user. The most popular —Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, TikTok— already integrate most of these functions of the lifelogging. “If you use social networks, you are doing lifelogging; although do lifelogging it is not necessarily your intention”, warns Ted Chaing, science fiction writer and one of the most heard voices on this subject. “People are perfectly comfortable broadcasting their daily activities through social networks for anyone to see,” he explains during a talk at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “Now, it’s possible that people’s desire for privacy prevents the lifelogging get out of control. However, today we have much less privacy than we did 20 years ago, and we have had little objection to this.” And that is perhaps the biggest problem.
The privacy dilemma
The implications of lifelogging —often related to Artificial Intelligence tools, such as facial recognition— could be one of the biggest threats to user privacy. “Not only because there are people who do not decide to record themselves and are going to be recorded, but because we have not even stopped to think about it,” reflects Espuny. “Given that the exploitation of the data derived from the lifelogging has considerable potential, this practice has become the subject of debate and initiatives have arisen that advocate a socially responsible use of the sensitive information it generates”, acknowledges Franganillo. The researcher highlights that the analysis of pieces of personal information such as photos, videos, tweets or location data can offer a wrong portrait of the user, “especially if they are taken out of context”. “Digital devices can be murky,” he warns.
Espuny blames “surveillance capitalism” for this. “The digital economies have led us towards what is called surveillance capitalism, where we suffer from an invasion of our privacy and the commercialization of it, since it becomes a commodity.” The case of Cambridge Analytica, which put Facebook in the eye of the hurricane and started the debate on the privacy of user data, is the best example of what the sociologist explains.
But Antonio Tenorio, sociologist, teacher and narrator, sees it differently. “Holding technology responsible for situations that happen in it is naive and ignores the fact that technological advances are the result of the changes that societies have undergone or are ready to deepen,” he comments. Tenorio suggests that the real problem is not in the devices that record all the time, but “in the way in which everyone who pours their privacy and intimacy into the pyre of self-sacrifice is socially rewarded, instigated and valued.” . “The banality with which privacy and intimacy are given away is what we should observe and analyze. I believe that we are at the dawn of the digital or hyperdigital era and to that extent we are in a transition stage that, like all others, will be self-regulated in relation to the place that privacy and intimacy should occupy”, predicts Tenorio.
Meanwhile, the lifelogging it is already here and – motivated by the golden age of social networks, the robust market for mobile phones, the fragility of human memory and the low cost of digital storage – some will continue to play at being the archivists and cartographers of their own lives . “In the end, the lifelogging it provides that enriched self-analysis, the ability to relive one’s life with Proustian detail, and the freedom to memorize less and think more creatively,” concludes Franganillo. But since all that glitters is not gold, the privacy debate will always be there, and in the lifelogging as well.